Hello!
For those of you who have not seen my blogs on Blogger or Word Press let me tell you about us. First I am 35 and a mom of 3 wonderful kids (yes my name rivenfae is fictitious, but I have my reasons) , my boyfriend is almost 53 and we live on 5.29 acres of land in the Missouri woods.
We moved here in April of 2010 and have had quite an experience. We started off in a tent and having to haul our own water from a neighbor's house. Let me tell you living in a tent is fun... until you do it for 6+ months with 3 kids. After about 4 months we had our power hooked up which required a $350 deposit here, so we had to manage to have that much money at one time to pay it out.
Before we had the power on and could use our deep freeze we had been only buying non-perishable foods to eat, which isn't as bad as you might think. It does take some getting use to only using canned meats in inventive ways. Oddly enough almost a year later with one of those "dishes" we are thinking of buying a few different canned meats to "recapture" some flavors we discovered we liked.
For those of you who have not seen my blogs on Blogger or Word Press let me tell you about us. First I am 35 and a mom of 3 wonderful kids (yes my name rivenfae is fictitious, but I have my reasons) , my boyfriend is almost 53 and we live on 5.29 acres of land in the Missouri woods.
We moved here in April of 2010 and have had quite an experience. We started off in a tent and having to haul our own water from a neighbor's house. Let me tell you living in a tent is fun... until you do it for 6+ months with 3 kids. After about 4 months we had our power hooked up which required a $350 deposit here, so we had to manage to have that much money at one time to pay it out.
Before we had the power on and could use our deep freeze we had been only buying non-perishable foods to eat, which isn't as bad as you might think. It does take some getting use to only using canned meats in inventive ways. Oddly enough almost a year later with one of those "dishes" we are thinking of buying a few different canned meats to "recapture" some flavors we discovered we liked.
This is one of the "cook stoves" we had last year we built this one ourselves, all the metal on it was trash that was on our property. We had gotten so good at cooking with a wood fire that when we moved into our current (not final) home a 12X24 shed and started using a electric stove we wound up burning our food a few times till we got use to -NOT- cooking on wood.
We are rebuilding this in a new location as summer's heat is horrible here for cooking anything, but we have learned a couple of things that will change how we do it. The cinder blocks we used when they are repeatedly heated and then get wet when you go to move them after they will break.
As all homesteaders I have a garden, last year during our first year we just dug up and planted right in the ground. However, we did get for free a truckload of composted goat manure that i later added to the soil. i did learn things will grow in our very heavy clay soil. Just very slowly and that we need to water it a lot. So this year we have done a few things different, first the ground that got the goat manure is much better this year (no real surprise there), and all the amendment we put in; was straw once the plants were grown enough to put it down without choking the seedlings.
We have started foraging more this year than last i have over a quart of blackberries in my freezer right now waiting till the season is over so I can make some jelly/jam for the first time. It will be a multi-berry as I do have a wild blue berry nearby and I have gotten the few I found there to the blackberries. i am also hoping to add rose hips to it for vitamin C content. I have also come up with a wonderful Lamb's Quarter wilted salad that one of my kids and Silver likes. We eat that once or twice a week, people say they taste like spinach; I don't think so. I can't place the taste either.
As i said we are now living in a 12X24 shed, we got it delivered back in October and my 2 girls sleep in bunk beds built into the wall, my son is in the loft and me and my boy friend have a "room" next to the "toilet room". Our "toilet room" is just that our toilet is in it. It is a saw dust toilet, if you don't know what one is here is a link:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FPg-n4czGE0
I am surprised at how well this system works and you don't waste any water or have to worry about a septic backing up. We currently have a bath tub in a outdoor room in back that we use in warm weather (above 40 degrees). We are working towards building 2 additions onto this shed. One will be a better sleeping area for the kids and also a tv room. The other will be a bathroom, in which we will have a flush toilet (yeah!) and a shower. They will be built once we finish digging (by hand) our root cellar.Yes we are digging a root cellar and guess what...? It's soo easy! One of the biggest things that has helped is what we are using to "break" through the clay. It is a bulb planting drill bit that eats up clay. We put it on our masonry drill and it will tear right through the clay. then we just shovel the clay out. We have about 4 ft down to still go. Right now I believe it is 8X10X2ft. We need it just a bit deeper, which should be the easiest part.We are going to use all the clay we are digging up as well as we are going to build a cob-ish oven like this one:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1lGTGUo6tyQ
Not quite that one but very close as we are going to use a steel barrel for the body. I have a turkey in my chicken yard that is going to be a bit to big for my current oven so we'll need the cob-ish oven. When we put the addition on we will be using a rocket mass heater in it, this way we won't use any electricity for our heat this winter. We used just space heaters last year and our power bill went very high. For us wood is free so lets go with wood.So I hope you keep coming around to check us out here at Wolf Woods!Be Well and Blessed Be...
We are rebuilding this in a new location as summer's heat is horrible here for cooking anything, but we have learned a couple of things that will change how we do it. The cinder blocks we used when they are repeatedly heated and then get wet when you go to move them after they will break.
As all homesteaders I have a garden, last year during our first year we just dug up and planted right in the ground. However, we did get for free a truckload of composted goat manure that i later added to the soil. i did learn things will grow in our very heavy clay soil. Just very slowly and that we need to water it a lot. So this year we have done a few things different, first the ground that got the goat manure is much better this year (no real surprise there), and all the amendment we put in; was straw once the plants were grown enough to put it down without choking the seedlings.
We have started foraging more this year than last i have over a quart of blackberries in my freezer right now waiting till the season is over so I can make some jelly/jam for the first time. It will be a multi-berry as I do have a wild blue berry nearby and I have gotten the few I found there to the blackberries. i am also hoping to add rose hips to it for vitamin C content. I have also come up with a wonderful Lamb's Quarter wilted salad that one of my kids and Silver likes. We eat that once or twice a week, people say they taste like spinach; I don't think so. I can't place the taste either.
As i said we are now living in a 12X24 shed, we got it delivered back in October and my 2 girls sleep in bunk beds built into the wall, my son is in the loft and me and my boy friend have a "room" next to the "toilet room". Our "toilet room" is just that our toilet is in it. It is a saw dust toilet, if you don't know what one is here is a link:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FPg-n4czGE0
I am surprised at how well this system works and you don't waste any water or have to worry about a septic backing up. We currently have a bath tub in a outdoor room in back that we use in warm weather (above 40 degrees). We are working towards building 2 additions onto this shed. One will be a better sleeping area for the kids and also a tv room. The other will be a bathroom, in which we will have a flush toilet (yeah!) and a shower. They will be built once we finish digging (by hand) our root cellar.Yes we are digging a root cellar and guess what...? It's soo easy! One of the biggest things that has helped is what we are using to "break" through the clay. It is a bulb planting drill bit that eats up clay. We put it on our masonry drill and it will tear right through the clay. then we just shovel the clay out. We have about 4 ft down to still go. Right now I believe it is 8X10X2ft. We need it just a bit deeper, which should be the easiest part.We are going to use all the clay we are digging up as well as we are going to build a cob-ish oven like this one:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1lGTGUo6tyQ
Not quite that one but very close as we are going to use a steel barrel for the body. I have a turkey in my chicken yard that is going to be a bit to big for my current oven so we'll need the cob-ish oven. When we put the addition on we will be using a rocket mass heater in it, this way we won't use any electricity for our heat this winter. We used just space heaters last year and our power bill went very high. For us wood is free so lets go with wood.So I hope you keep coming around to check us out here at Wolf Woods!Be Well and Blessed Be...
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